


Allegiance

by Ashling



Category: The Far Pavilions - M. M. Kaye
Genre: 960 pages now that's what we call an epic, F/M, Married Life, Post-Canon, absolutely MASSIVE shoutout to MM Kaye for truly giving the emotional gutpunch, and that's been the state of the union for like six years now, is this just turning into an ad for people to read the book? yes! and I have no regrets, of feeling caught between two worlds and never belonging in either one, this pair owns my ass, trying to find and make a third world in someone else, what a fucking book, you know what I stan? married people that are in love with each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:19:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: In a wilderness so fierce and remote no army has yet tried to even map it, they make their oath. Husband and wife. One country.





	Allegiance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quin/gifts).



The moonlight casts a watery light across the sheets of their bed, turns it nearly blue. One window only, and they're lucky to have it. One-room house, and they're lucky to have it. One man, and she's lucky to have him. 

Asleep, Ash is at peace in a way that he's struggled to learn awake. The mountains have helped with that, but they've also made their mark on him: he looks fiercer now than he ever did before, sun-browned and spare, even though he can be gentler now than he's ever been.

Juli usually sleeps tucked into the curve of him, or all tangled up in him, or, if it's been a particularly restless night, using him as a pillow, to which he rarely objects. But now she's curled on her side, not touching him, just observing.

He was gone for a month, helping with the autumn harvest. A whole month. And yes, Juli agreed to this. Encouraged it, even. She waved goodbye to him with an encouraging smile on her face, didn't cry when he rode out of sight. She got used to the silence, in her own way. The forest creatures kept themselves to themselves in a way that the courtiers of her childhood never did; the birds of prey might well rip the entrails out of soft-furred, defenseless animals, but it was honest work compared to the lies and poisons she used to dodge. 

Now that he's back, though, she's willing to admit that she missed him. It's not a weakness now, when she's proved so well that she can be on her own. She doesn't need him to survive, doesn't even need him to keep from being desperately miserable, but she does need him to feel like this. Happy doesn't have the weight of it.

When they renounced all kingdoms, they built their own. Things expanded to fill the vacuum. The part of the piney forest she knows by heart now has become a province of its own, the clear-running mountain stream become a river, the fire in her hearth a second sun. She guides her days by these things, and yet she could pack up all of it in the body of the man beside her and take it with her to another land, as easy as rolling up a map. If she had to. Maybe someday she will.

Tonight, though. Tonight she runs her eyes over him because he's back now and she can. 

He has both feet stuck out from the side of the sheet, a habit that has never failed to amuse her. And then there's the upper half of his back above the sheet, his shoulders, his neck, his face half-pressed into the mattress, turned towards her. One arm under his head in lieu of a pillow, the other outflung towards her, smooth in a way that belies the shape it can take when he's in motion, hand clenched around the hilt of a sword or the handle or her own hand.

Something about that hand, palm down beside her, catches her eye. There's a scab curving at the base of his thumb, likely younger than a week, and too small to warrant a bandage. Maybe a nick from a knife. A story she hasn't heard yet. She wants to touch it. 

A thought that comes over her unexpectedly, or maybe a feeling: there will always be more of him, more stories she doesn't know, places she hasn't been, wounds she wasn't there to stop. He's a person, distinct from her. But there will also always be this, the conversations they have, the bed they share, the ointment they spread on each other's scars with careful fingers. He is the smallest country she's ever had and yet she feels full to bursting. Wants to share this with him, if she can.

"Ash," she whispers. Shouldn't. There's wood to split, tomorrow, and water to haul, and with their child tucked safe in the curve of her belly, she knows his work will only increase. But this is marriage, and looking at him, she feels she has leave to be greedy. 

He doesn't stir.

She cups her small hand over her mouth, breathes out warm until her palm is warm too, and then she reaches out and runs it along the angled planes of his shoulder blades in slow sweeps as she says his name again.

"Mm." He blinks awake, looking at her with a sleepy and oddly cautious expression. She can tell the second that he recognizes her, because his caution disappears into appreciation at the sight and he hums again, nearly half an octave lower. Slower. "Mmm."

Her heart is in her throat. There are so many things she cannot say because she can't find the words. But she can do more than talk.

She devours the sight of him as he turns onto his back, a little clumsily. Raising herself up, weight on one arm, she lingers above him for a minute, poised.

"Juli," he says. There's a rasp in his voice.

She tilts her head and uses her free hand to push her hair over her shoulder; it waterfalls down till it curtains them off, only their faces in the soft dark, a closeness so intense it's almost sharp. They have no need to hide anymore, but she likes this still. She likes the focus. It brings everything else to surface: the brush of her hair against her cheek, a smell of sweat from one of them or maybe both, the slight give in his chest when her hand presses down.

She hears him inhale, ragged. Even blind, she knows what happens next.

He buries his hands in her hair and draws her down to him, and she opens her mouth even though she doesn't quite know exactly where his is. They meet slightly crooked, his lips smearing the corner of hers, but just as soon, they shift slightly into each other. Juli licks into Ash's mouth, and in return, he scrapes his bottom row of teeth delicately along her bottom lip. They are too old to make a new language for themselves, but what they lack in sound, they have always known in their bodies, instincts as old as the land itself.


End file.
